This page shall serve as a common place to look if you're in search of a DragonFly related project. It's also the place to check if someone else is already working on it (to prevent project collision) or should be contacted.

-

+Projects that can be clearly used for Google Code-In are marked with their category, where applicable. Some unmarked items may be eligible; it depends on how the student wants to tackle the project.

[[!toc levels=3 ]]

-

-

-## Website projects

-

-

-* Correct [mailing lists page](http://www.dragonflybsd.org/community/mail.cgi) and [news page](http://www.dragonflybsd.org/community/news.cgi) to better describe the content of each list.

-

-

-* Create layout for http://bugs.dragonflybsd.org that matches the main site.

-

-

-* Check through all the [DragonFly mirrors](http://www.dragonflybsd.org/community/download.cgi) and report on any that aren't working

-

-

-* Create short list of tasks for a new DragonFly user (this information is all available elsewhere, but it's buried in a lot of other data):

-* Help out in http://bugs.dragonflybsd.org (try to reproduce, diagnose, propose fixes ...)

-

-

-* Organize, contribute to, and finish the C book project.

-

-

+### Write manpages

+* sysref (GCI:Documentation or Research)

## Userland projects

-

-* Bring in BSD-licensed versions of some text tools like `grep`, `diff` and `sort`. The Open***BSD guys already did some work related to that. If you manage to bring the tools to DragonFly, check if everything works as expected (e.g. rc.d scripts, make world runs, ...). Of course the new tools need to have at least all the features of the old GNU tools.

-

-

-* Update the [contributed software](ContribSoftware) which is out-of-date.

-

-

-* Remove `NOINET6` build option

-

-

-* `WARN` corrections to utilities

-

-

-* Clean our code to make it [style(9)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command#style&sectionANY) compatible. Compile and test your changes. Verify that the checksum (sha(1)) of the unmodified object matches the checksum of the cleaned object. Check also with strip(1)+sha(1)

-

-

-* Bring in code from other *BSDs:

-

-

-* smbfs changes from FreeBSD

-

-

-* pf changes from OpenBSD

-

-

-* Randomize mmap() offsets as described in http://www.openbsd.org/papers/ven05-deraadt/index.html

-

-

+### One-liners

+* Bring in smbfs changes from FreeBSD (GCI:Code)

+* rpc.lockd and rpc.statd sync with FreeBSD (GCI:Code)

* Add extended slice support to `fdisk`

-

-

-* Install Coverity and fix the FreeBSD bugs that were uncovered by Coverity, but do not just blindly pull over the FreeBSD patches. Make sure that you first understand what the patch does.

-* Write a tool to monitor changes in other code bases such as FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD. corecode is busy with this one (http://oly.corecode.ath.cx/~corecode/cgi-bin/crosscgi.py) (svn repository (https://fortunaty.net/svn/crossref/)).

+* If you manage to bring the tools to DragonFly, check if everything works as expected (e.g. rc.d scripts, make world runs, ...).

+### GDB

* ptrace/gdb follow-fork-mode support and more (peek at linux)

-

-

* Change the build to create one libbfd for gdb and binutils

-

-

* Separate RPC code from NFS into separate library.

+### I/O diagnostic utilities

+* A utility similar to top which displays I/O usage on a per-process basis

+* Network, Disk

+### SMART capabilities

+* Add to camcontrol

+* Add to natacontrol (see NetBSD's atactl?)

-## Kernel projects

+### Disk scheduling rc scripts (GCI:Code)

+* Create a rc script to manage the disk/io scheduling system

+* Perhaps 1 entry to "enable" it, and all disks will have mode set to "auto", in auto mode smart inquiries and other heuristics could attempt to determine the best i/o scheduler

+* Per-device and device class or similar defaults should be definable in rc.conf also

+* The bulk of this functionality could be implemented in a resurrected "dschedctl" utility and exposed through the rc interface using just a thin wrapper, allowing hotplug scripts and etc. an easier option to use the same facilities.

+### libHAMMER

+* HAMMER has the capability to expose very rich information to userland through ioctl's.

+* Currently the hammer(8) utility makes use of this information in an ad-hoc manner.

+* Port this core functionality into a public libhammer library so that other base and third party utilities may take advantage of it.

+* crypt(3) can legitimately return NULL on error, but many consumers do not check for this, instead passing the return directly to str[n]cmp. Fix these cases.

+* Fix these cases in pkgsrc as well.

+### Live images enhancement

-* Port the BSDL OSS code to DragonFly

+The live images could be made easier to use by not assuming a QWERTY keyboard layout.

+Not beeing able to choose a localized keyboard layout before having to type 'installer' or 'root' may be a deal breaker for some users.

+A simple menu replacing login(1) and displaying the following three choices could be a good solution:

-* Complete Path MTU Discovery by adding a host route to remember the Path MTU and setting a timer to expire old host routes. See netinet/if_ether.c for an example of this mechanism as used by ARP. Periodically increase MTU of hosts that have had its MTU decreased.

-

-

-* Look for places in the kernel that can benefit from Solaris-style caching of preconstructed slab allocator objects. If we can find enough of these uses, we can add this functionality to the kernel memory allocator.

-

-

-* Implement `sem_open()`, `sem_close()`, and `sem_unlink()`.

-

-

-* Clean our code to make it [style(9)](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command#style&sectionANY) compatible. Compile and test your changes. Verify that the checksum (sha(1)) of the unmodified object matches the checksum of the cleaned object. Check also with strip(1)+sha(1)

-

-

-* Setup a regression testing machine/system to register and find problems and new improvements..

-* Port drivers from other systems. (Being able to support most of the wireless adapters out there would be nice.)

-

-

-* Port TMPFS. Look [here](http://wiki.freebsd.org/TMPFS) for the work the Free***BSD guys did.

+1. Set keyboard layout

+2. Launch the installer

+3. Login as root

+### pkill/pgrep enhancement

-* Port ZFS. Look [here](http://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFS) for the work the Free***BSD guys did.

+killall recently gained a -T flag to kill all descendents of a tty, bring this feature to pkill/pgrep and evaluate any other features flags of these utilities and bring them to parity.

+## Kernel projects

-* Port NFSv4. [This mail](http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/mailarchive/kernel/2008-01/msg00065.html) is a good starting point.

-

-

-* Port/sync the following from FreeBSD:

-

+### One-liners

+* Port the BSDL OSS code to DragonFly

+* Complete Path MTU Discovery by adding a host route to remember the Path MTU and setting a timer to expire old host routes. See netinet/if_ether.c for an example of this mechanism as used by ARP. Periodically increase MTU of hosts that have had its MTU decreased.

+* Perhaps look to see how Linux can boot in one second, better pci scan code?

+* "Some kernel work made it possible to do asynchronous initialization of some subsystems. For example, the modified kernel starts the Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) initialization, to handle storage, at the same time as the Universal Host Controller Interface (UHCI), in order to handle USB" - http://lwn.net/Articles/299483/

-* implement a Fair Queuing scheduler (even out the access to IO between competing processes/users)

-

-

-* Work relating LWKT (LightWeightKernelThreading)

-

+### Modify firmware framework

+* We currently use the firmware(9) FreeBSD also uses

+* It would be more appropriate to avoid future problems with redistribution problems, etc, to adapt the wifi firmware stuff to use the firmware(9) we used to have before, which was able to load firmware files from userland (/etc/firmware).

+* Map a read/execute trampoline page into every process, which has a syscall table, i.e. is used instead of "int" to enter the kernel. This way we can easily change the kernel enter method from "int" to e.g. "sysenter" without having to recompile userland applications, or even implement some syscalls in userspace.

+

+### Compressed in-memory swap device

+* A device that uses physical memory as swap space, but compresses it.

+* Do we support stacking of swap space? For example, one would have this compressed in-memory swap device with highest priority. Replaced objects will be put into the next priority swap device (e.g. a SSD), and so on.

+

+### mmap MAP_ALIGN

+* Solaris's mmap support a flag, MAP_ALIGN, where the address to mmap acts as an alignment hint

+* Our backing VM calls support an alignment parameter, but our public mmap does not

+* This would allow nmalloc to allocate slabs (64k, 64k-aligned) without wastage

+

+### vnode dumps

+* It may be beneficial to be able to have crash dumps written to an ordinary file in configurations where swap is not configured.

+

+### vnode swap

+* Add a vnode-backed swap pager that respects a file size limit, to allow paging to a "swap file" on a filesystem.

+

+### Kernel allocator feature enhancements

+* Enhance objcache in a manner that will allow the initialization to specify allocation functions which will allocate and free entire slabs of memory, not just single objects.

+* Rework the kmalloc allocator to sit on top of objcache (there are various dependencies to making this work).

+* Create or sort out a metric for vnode/other cache object cycling rate that can indicate realistic memory pressure.

+* Clear out free objcache slabs under memory pressure.

+* Add reclaim functionality to objcache, such that it may ask consumers to free objects back into it under memory pressure.

+

+### Tear out serializers

+* Serializers could be _carefully_ replaced with MTX locks?

+

+### Tear out condvars

+* Conditional vars -- condvar(9), could be replaced with other locking primitives and our tsleep/wakeup interlock.

+

+### Make karc4random in libkern per-cpu (or at least wrap its own token around it)

+* Verify that it is possible and safe to do this, what care would need to be taken, especially with respect to the random seeding?

+* Pull out locks around calls to karc4rand*

+

+### Improve kernel spinlock debug-ability

+* Add a const char *descr field to the spinlock structure.

+* Adjust spin_init() and all use cases, SPINLOCK_INITIALIZER() could juse use macro string extensions (# head) to install the name there.

+* Adjust error messages to print the spinlock desc field.

+* This change will require a full world & kernel recompile.

+

+### Partially rewrite buffer cache

+* Buffer cache buffers map VM pages from the filesystems VM-backed vnodes, the "buffer space" is the maximum amount of virtual space to allocate to these buffers.

+* When the buffer_map KVA space gets fragmented it caused very expensive defrag operations, the buffer_map KVA was recently increased to double the actual buffer space to allow full space utilization in the face of fragmentation and reduce the frequency of defrag operations.

+* Rewrite the buffer cache to have separate spaces or separate buffer pools for different sizes (16, 32, 64, 128, 256... up to max).

+* The vm_map API is used to allocate kvm out of the buffer_map. If the buffer's KVAs are preallocated then things can basically just be setup linearly at boot time.

+

+### Sync wireless infrastructure / drivers from FreeBSD

+* Rui Paulo ported the wireless infrastructure and ath drivers to DragonFly from FreeBSD in recent history. A lot has changed in the intervening time, the infrastructure should be synchronized/updated to match the state-of-the-art in FreeBSD. At a minimum the drivers that currently work in DragonFly should be tested to ensure functionality and updates as well or improved.

+

+### Add informational hardware-related sysctl's

+* MacOS X exports a bunch of cpu-specific sysctl's detailing sizes, layout, features, etc. Most/all of this could be detected by a userspace program, but exporting these makes the barrier of entry to cpu-conditional code lower.

+* Research which of these sysctl's is the most useful and add them, using the same node names as OSX.